Helen F. Ladd

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About Helen

Ladd’s current research and teaching focuses primarily on education policy, both in the U.S. and in other countries. She is interested in range of contemporary public policy issues, including school choice, teacher labor markets, accountability, and school finance. She co-chairs “Broader, Bolder Approach to Education” (boldapproach.org), a national campaign that acknowledges the impact of social and economic disadvantage on schools and students and proposes evidence-based policies to improve schools and remedy conditions that limit many children’s readiness to learn. Ladd is also a Board member of the Durham, NC branch of Communities in Schools, a dropout prevention program.

Publications

Examines how New Zealand’s highly touted experience with self-governing schools, parental choice and competition during the 1990s highlights the potential downsides for the U.S. and other countries of reforms that embrace those concepts.

Measures the community wide effects on third grade tests scores of two well-known programs in North Carolina in contrast to other studies of early childhood programs that focus on individual participants. We conclude that each of the programs generated large and positive effects.

Finds how, in this empirical study of teacher mobility in North Carolina, schools with very high proportions of minority students would have to pay teacher salaries more than 50 percent higher than those in other schools to retain teachers with strong qualifications.

Shows how the Netherlands demonstrates the potential for a country to fund its schools in a highly progressive manner. Cultural and institutional differences between the U.S. and the Netherlands, however, limit the direct applicability of the Dutch model to the funding of schools within U.S. cities.

"Education and Poverty: Confronting the Evidence (Presidential Address to the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management)" Journal of Policy Analysis and Management31, no. 2 (2012): 203-227.

Discusses how current U.S. policy initiatives to improve the U.S. education system, including No Child Left Behind, test-based evaluation of teachers, and the promotion of competition, are misguided because they either deny or set to the side the clear evidence that students from disadvantaged households on average perform less well in school than those from advantaged households.

Explores the complexity of defining and measuring education quality in a way that can help public decision making. We explore the advantages and disadvantages of different approaches and highlight the merits of each with respect to different normative equity standards.